The Un-Cola

Even before I knew any French, I knew le, un, and une. Unfortunately, I was murdering all their pronunciations. In the case of le, this is particularly tragic. French plurals are (usually) so easy! Just say les ("lay") in front of the word that there's more than one of, and yer done! But I picked up this horrible habit of pronouncing le (singular) as "lay", probably because of Pepe le Pew. This bit of self-sabotage may take me years to undo.

Usually, saying un when you mean une, or vice versa, doesn't result in a gaffe or result in the guy at the store handing you the wrong thing. It's just like a neon sign advertising the fact that you are not a native speaker. What's so bad about that, anyway? Maybe I should treat it as a blessing in disguise.

Une is hard to say because it is the characteristic French u sound, one that must be said with one's lips rounded to a preposterous degree. For me, at least, un is hard to say because it sounds so un-French. The u vowel here is very close to the slack-jawed English one. In fact, as a mnemonic, I am now envisioning a hyphen between un and the noun that follows. If, in un verre de vin, I say "un-verre", I get a glass of wine. Not its opposite, whatever that would be (a good question for many of France's 20th-century philosophers).